Tales of Old Japan eBook

took charge of the house in his absence, was frightened
by a fearful noise proceeding from a pond in the garden,
and, thinking that this certainly must be the ghost
that she had heard so much about, she covered her head
with the bed-clothes and remained breathless with
terror. When her husband came home, she told
him what had happened; and on the following night he
returned earlier than usual, and waited for the ghostly
noise. At the same time as before, a little after
midnight, the same sound was heard—­as though
a gun had been fired inside the pond. Opening
the shutters, he looked out, and saw something like
a black cloud floating on the water, and in the cloud
was the form of a bald man. Thinking that there
must be some cause for this, he instituted careful
inquiries, and learned that the former tenant, some
ten years previously, had borrowed money from a blind
shampooer,[71] and, being unable to pay the debt,
had murdered his creditor, who began to press him
for his money, and had thrown his head into the pond.
The fencing-master accordingly collected his pupils
and emptied the pond, and found a skull at the bottom
of it; so he called in a priest, and buried the skull
in a temple, causing prayers to be offered up for the
repose of the murdered man’s soul. Thus
the ghost was laid, and appeared no more.

[Footnote 71: The apparently poor shaven-pated
and blind shampooers of Japan drive a thriving trade
as money-lenders. They give out small sums at
an interest of 20 per cent. per month—­210
per cent. per annum—­and woe betide the
luckless wight who falls into their clutches.]

The belief in curses hanging over families for generations
is as common as that in ghosts and supernatural apparitions.
There is a strange story of this nature in the house
of Asai, belonging to the Hatamoto class. The
ancestor of the present representative, six generations
ago, had a certain concubine, who was in love with
a man who frequented the house, and wished in her
heart to marry him; but, being a virtuous woman, she
never thought of doing any evil deed. But the
wife of my lord Asai was jealous of the girl, and persuaded
her husband that her rival in his affections had gone
astray; when he heard this he was very angry, and
beat her with a candlestick so that he put out her
left eye. The girl, who had indignantly protested
her innocence, finding herself so cruelly handled,
pronounced a curse against the house; upon which,
her master, seizing the candlestick again, dashed
out her brains and killed her. Shortly afterwards
my lord Asai lost his left eye, and fell sick and
died; and from that time forth to this day, it is
said that the representatives of the house have all
lost their left eyes after the age of forty, and shortly
afterwards they have fallen sick and died at the same
age as the cruel lord who killed his concubine.